Paper Info
Title
Delay Announcements For Call Centers With Hyperexponential Patience Modeling
Abstract
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide delay announcements for call centers with hyperexponential patience modeling. The paper aims to employ a state-dependent Markovian approximation for informing arriving customers about anticipated delay in a real call center.Design/methodology/approach - Motivated by real call center data, the patience distribution is modeled by the hyperexponential distribution and is analyzed by its realistic significance, with and without delay information. Appropriate M/M/s/r + H-2 queueing model is structured, including a voice response system that is employed in practice, and a state-dependent Markovian approximation is applied for computing abandonment. Based on this approximation, a method is proposed for estimating virtual delays, and it is investigated about the problem of announcing virtual delays to customers upon their arrival.Findings - There are two parts of findings from the results obtained from the case study and a numerical study of simulation comparisons. First, using an H-2 distribution for the abandonment distribution is driven by an empirical study which shows its good fit to real-life call center data. Second, simulation experiments indicate that the model and approximation are reasonable, and the state-dependent Markovian approximation works very well for call centers with larger pooling. It is concluded that our approach can be applied in a voice response system of real call centers.Originality/value - Many results pertain to announcing delay information, customer reactions and links to estimating hyperexponential distribution based on real data that have not been established in previous studies; however, this paper analytically characterizes these performance measures for delay announcements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1108/IMDS-07-2016-0254
INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT & DATA SYSTEMS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Predicting and announcing delays, Hyperexponential distribution, Impatient customers, Markovian approximation, State-dependent analysis
Patience,Markov process,Computer science,Pooling,Originality,Queueing theory,Hyperexponential distribution,Empirical research,Marketing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
117
6
0263-5577
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yu Miao11813.21
Jun Gong2378.90
Jiafu Tang354149.29
Fanwen Kong400.68